Sonoma County health and education officials encourage student masking after state mandate ends Friday

Sonoma County health and education officials on Wednesday said indoor masking for students will be “strongly recommended,” even as the state is scheduled to lift student masking requirements after Friday.

On March 1, state health officials urged residents to continue masking indoors even after lifting the requirement that unvaccinated people mask indoors in public settings. The indoor mask rule was lifted for vaccinated residents on Feb. 15.

The continued relaxation of indoor mask rules comes as new coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths continue to decline from a winter surge in cases fueled by the omicron variant.

During a community COVID-19 briefing Wednesday, Steven Herrington, superintendent of the Sonoma County Office of Education, said schools are currently following state workplace safety rules that require unvaccinated school staff and parent volunteers to continue masking indoors.

“If you are unvaccinated and you are in a school setting, you need to wear a mask and you will eventually need to be tested weekly,” Herrington said. “We anticipate further clarification on this in the days to come.”

Herrington said local districts — there are 40 in Sonoma County — can implement stricter standards than the ones currently laid out by the state.

Some, like Santa Rosa, have said they intend to keep the requirement at least in the near term, while others will relax it.

Anna Trunnell, superintendent of Santa Rosa City Schools, said factors such as staff vaccination rates, test positivity, hospitalizations and student infections will be examined to determine masking policies.

“Right now we have about an 85% vaccination rate of our staff,” Trunnell said. “We are looking at our community members as well to make sure that we’re paying attention to student vaccination rates which we currently do not collect data for.”

Officials said Wednesday that local coronavirus transmission continues to decline from the peak of the omicron surge in January, when new daily cases reached more than 250 per 100,000 people. Today, that rate is 10.6 new cases per 100,000, said Kathryn Pack, health program manager for the county’s epidemiology team.

Pack said overall test positivity, the share of COVID-19 tests with a positive result, is now down to 3.3%. In mid-January, it got as high as 22%, with well over 1,000 local residents becoming infected every day.

Dr. Urmila Shende, the county’s vaccination chief, said that even those who contract a mild case of COVID-19 run the risk of getting “long COVID syndrome” for periods of anywhere from four weeks to several months. Shende said state health officials report that as many as 10% to 20% of all those who test positive for COVID-19 are left with some kind of long COVID.

“These (conditions) include fatigue, coughing, joint pain and difficulty maintaining focus, otherwise known as brain fog,” she said.

Both education and health officials said the best way to avoid COVID-19 and to ensure that pandemic infection rates remain low is for more people, including younger students, to get vaccinated.

Pack said that since August, there have been more than 4,700 infections among local students. She said these were cases reported by schools, where the students were on campus while still infectious.

The majority of school cases among students and staff occurred during the omicron surge in January, Pack said. A disproportionate share of those infections were among Latino students, she added.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @pressreno.